I actually bought her debut album BECAUSE of hearing her on Eminem. And then her next two albums. Pre-ordered the third, in fact.

It worked. I paid money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KqFJ5pPu2g

In an alternate universe, Microsoft didn't buy Bungie, and the iMacs became the ultimate game platforms. I will never forgive Microsoft for perhaps the smartest move they ever made. It was, to quote Cutler Beckett from POTC III, "just good business." :(

Quoting myself:

Michael Gavon on 'Rocket Science' ©1990

For example: Mining the asteroids for Unobtanium. To mine the Unobtanium, you need to lift the mining equipment to the asteroid. Bring or get the energy to mine it. Load it and de-orbit it from the Belt to Earth AND THEN STOP IT. You can work some cool tricks (slingshots, balutes, solar sails, whatnot) but the energy remains the same. The amount of energy to get something there and back is IMMENSE. You will NEVER recoup that money spent on energy and structure by selling what you bring back. Remember the payload of rocks from Apollo.

The only thing up there that MIGHT pay for itself is an energy source, like Dilithium. Nothing else is worth it.

Find another motivation. Today's XKCD might help, or it might explain why it WON'T work.

You decide... and decide you must. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice ;-)

I have programmed on TRS-80s and 8088 w/8087s. Compiled C and Read & Go BASIC.

But now I'm programming python on an 8-core Xeon. When I'm writing a stored procedure or a nested loop of two recordsets, I ***STILL*** catch myself thinking about how slowly those instructions would take on a slower machine. "Do you know how LONG that looping will take?... oh. 0.000006 seconds. heh heh. I catch myself "subvocalizing" the loops, and I shy away from something "so resource intensive" and look for another, more efficient solution.

Yes, it's great to learn how a computer does what it does, but if you miss the simple solution because your mind is "read and go"-ing, then you hobble yourself.

The only place which would be "constantly" in the umbra from the Sun would be the L2 LaGrange point, opposite the sun. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Lagrange_points2.svg The Sun-staring SOHO uses the opposite L1 to stay OUT of the umbra. However, it's roughly a million miles from earth. So, let's just say no and build another one.

Any other place that you "park it" will end up revolving into view of the Sun. Sorry. I didn't design this system.

From the website:

(THEY DO!? Didn't Apple say that for decades?)

12 years after 5 fruity colors!

Especially the virus and Trojan writers. They LOVE sharing Windows with you!

Others:

• For example, the mouse works differently. (Yes, it works BETTER!)
• If you use Apple's productivity suite, sharing files with PC users can be tricky. Your documents might not look right and your spreadsheets might not calculate correctly. (Oh, but OUR OWN MS Office works fine. But ignore that until after you buy a computer)
• You'll have to buy a separate hardware dongle to plug your Mac into a standard VGA projector. (Yes, that is how I choose a computer~ You need a dongle to plug a PC into a 30" Apple Cinema, too!)
  
  NOT ONE MENTION of Malware, Virus, Trojans. This should work as well as the "I'm A PC" or "the Churro Campaign"~

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-not-typewriter-professional-level-Macintosh/dp/1877932051/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280942506&sr=1-4

I didn't like it. It didn't' shoot anything...

Ikaros is not in an "orbit". It is in a (nearly) constant-thrust trajectory which drops inward from earth toward Venus. As a windsurfer, you can easily imagine a windboard being towed by a jetski at 10 knots. With the wind from your left, you cut loose, catch the breeze, bear left and accelerate to 20 knots, whipping around another jetski passing at 18 knots. But then, you sail by and surf down the coast, leaving the jet skis behind. That is what IKAROS is doing. It has no way to apply the 'brakes' to stop or orbitally insert into Venus. The parents analogy was misinformation. You can't thrust TOWARD the sun any more than a hot air balloon can set a sail and move upwind.

A sailboat can travel against the wind because the force which is perpendicular to the wind is pushing the KEEL/daggerboard with an angle of attack against the WATER! The keel is a wing which generates 'lift' upwind. If you want to test this, pull up the daggerboard and the boat will slip sideways against the wind. Without the keel and the water, the boat will not progress into the wind.

If you angle the sail of the spacecraft, you will get a reduced thrust away from the sun, and a force in the horizontal direction (perpendicular to the radius vector). Canting the sail will bump the s/c side to side, and will reduce the thrust, but you can ONLY reduce thrust to Zero! You can't go negative. No braking thrust. ONLY if you "luff" the sail, parallel to the solar wind, will the thrust drop to zero, but then you are coasting UP the gravity well. By that time, you are probably past escape velocity, and will not be seen again. And remember, you didn't remove the initial orbital velocity of Earth, so you 'climb' is really a slowly-increasing spiral. At that distance, adding 10% to your velocity is escape velocity (at earth radius, V0 * sqrt(2)... 41% increase is escape, less farther out.)

disclosure: I'm a degreed aerospace engineer and accomplished sailor.

Only if the vaporized material is "nozzled" in a single direction. If it just goes everywhere, you get no net change in momentum. AND... if it move "a little" then the beam won't be hitting it. Try sending a bowling ball down an alley by hitting it with a BB gun.

Also, in another post, I stated a "rule of thumb", that a rifle in orbit can't fire a bullet fast enough to de-orbit. Your vaporization won't change the velocity enough to notice, orbitally speaking.

Parent is a degreed Aerospace engineer. You are correct about the delta-V. Google "specific impulse" and realize why it takes a 365 foot rocket to lift a volkswagen. That is... why the propellant to payload ratio is so freaking high! (Technical term)

Regarding the radiometer: The answer is 'yes, but...' You would have to hit the object with enough "photon momentum" to change the velocity, literally, delta the v. The losses of distance, surface area reduce your killer beam to a few photons pretty fast. And it's SURE not worth the cost.

Magnitudes are your enemy here. If you shot a .308 rifle out the "back" of the ISS (retrograde to velocity), the bullet probably wouldn't de-orbit. That's a lot of delta-v! If you shot it straight down (down the radius vector), it would loop around you and come back DOWN at you 1 orbit later and at the same velocity it left!

To accomplish this, you would need a vast array of laser brooms. The percentage of objects which travel through your cone of opportunity are a minuscule proportion. You can't cover 180 degrees (the part you can see) of the sky because the distance to the target at the horizon is several hundred km through thermal layers.

The inverse of that minuscule proportion is the number of brooms you'd need.

Forget the energy needed and environmental impact of blasting a terawatt (ok, then... how big?) laser into space. You hit a Vulcan in the eye with that an they will be pissed!

In no order:

• It takes the same delta-v to de-orbit any two masses in the same orbit. Paint chip or Star Destroyer. Thrust requirements follow Newton, not Roddenberry.
• Whatever energy you have to apply to an object must be applied to the object. It's 100km away at 7km per second. Good luck.
• The delta-v to get close enough to where you can apply delta-v (bump a paint chip) adds up. If you could hit it with a beam from 100km away, that would be great, but delivering delta-v at 100km is problematic.
• Almost nothing is magnetic, so forget that. We don't have a tractor beam, and Yarkovsky Effect is insignificant on these tiny pieces. A maser/laser doesn't deliver momentum very well. Heat does nothing.
• Blobs of Aerogel in a counter-directional/retrograde orbit could sweep up the small stuff, but the volume that needs to be swept is like mopping a basketball court with a cotton swab.

Solve the "how do you apply force at a distance" issue and yer halfway there.